Processing Clitic Pronouns in Bulgarian — Evidence from Normal and Agrammatic Comprehension

Abstract

Clitic clusters display a complicated interaction of prosodic and syntactic properties which determines their word order and stress patterns. In Bulgarian, short pronouns appear as unstressed verbal enclitics in positive utterances. Proclitic negation attracts the pronouns and forms with them a prosodic unit stressed on the second syllable, the pronoun. Theoretical linguistics characterizes the behaviour of object clitics in terms of "non-trivial chains" (Bošković 2001) containing copies. The overt realisation of a higher or lower copy depends on phonological constraints like enclitisation requirements. In line with the slow-syntax-hypothesis (Burkhardt et al. 2008) and with the assumption that prosody-related processes may also compete for the same limited processing resources of Broca's aphasics , we test sensitivity to the phonosyntactic constraints negation imposes on the word order of personal and reflexive clitics. Results suggest that the pattern of agrammatic processing of clitic clusters resembles normal comprehension but proceeds in a protracted manner. Employing a self-paced reading task and an experimental design which reduces discourse-related interpretation processes, we also show that the syntactic functions of personal object clitics as syntactic object agreement markers in Bulgarian are relatively preserved in the aphasic group.

Convergence by Shared Ancestry in Romance

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New language versions of MAIN: Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives – Revised

“…Every Bulgarian verb is lexically specified as perfective or imperfective, the aspectual property being transparently encoded in the derivational and inflectional structure of the verb (Maslov, 1981). Besides a small number of simplex forms, perfective verbs are derived by means of derivational affixes, while secondary imperfective forms are derived by means of inflectional suffixes (for an extended discussion of the derivation-inflection divide see Kuehnast (2003)). Lexically perfective and imperfective verbs can be used in all tenses, except for perfective verbs in present tense.…”

Slavic Psycholinguistics in the 21st Century

“…Each FDSL conference features several talks that present psycholinguistic experiments on Slavic languages. For example, between FDSL-4 (2001) and FDSL-11 (2015), there were talks on negation and aspect in Bulgarian (Kühnast 2003), superiority effects and wh-questions in Russian (Meyer 2002), prosody and focus in Bulgarian (Oliver and Andreeva 2004), grammatical gender in Czech (Bordag 2008) and Russian (Sekerina 2008), relative clause attachment ambiguity in Russian (Fedorova et al 2007), and neg-raising in Slovenian (Dočekal and Dotlačil 2015), just to name a few. Moreover, the three recent FDSL conferences hosted special psycholinguistic workshops on heritage Slavic languages (FDSL-10 in 2013 in Leipzig), first language acquisition of Slavic languages (FDSL-11 in 2015 in Potsdam), and on experimental semantics and pragmatics (FDSL-12 in 2016 in Berlin).…”